Jane Barraclough

THREE days after Japan's biggest-ever earthquake and its colossal shock waves pummeled Fukushima's coast, reducing the TEPCO Daiichi nuclear plant to radioactive wreckage, Mari Takenouchi cycled frantically through East Tokyo with her baby strapped on her back.

The Tokyo-born translator had set aside a small window of time to do last-minute errands before she and her one-year-old son fled to the Okinawa islands – Japan's southernmost prefecture, 2000 kilometres south of the unfolding crisis. En route to the airport, she rushed to get to a dentist appointment, taking her baby with her.

Takenouchi, and millions of others, were unaware of the radiation cloud over the capital. Three full meltdowns had already happened — uranium-packed fuel rods had overheated and liquefied, triggering a series of blasts on March 12 and 14.

“It was a fine day with some breeze. I'll never forget the wind hitting my face, while I was riding my bicycle with my baby on my back,” she says.

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The cloud was at its thickest during the three hours Takenouchi and her son, Joe, spent outside before fleeing the mainland. According to the Tokyo metropolitan government's air samples, which were measured in Setagaya Ward, where Takenouchi was riding her bike, Joe was exposed to 145 times the normal level of background radiation in the city.

Kyoto University's reading was on par with that of hot spots in the deserted voluntary evacuation zone just 20-30 kilometres from the still-leaking plant.

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“I really want to turn the clock backwards,” Takenouchi says. “Our flight was booked for the morning, but I moved it to 3pm so I could do some chores like getting my phone fixed and finishing off my dental work. Looking back, I probably could have done these things in Okinawa. But at that point, we were told Tokyo was a safe distance away.”

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At that stage, Tokyo Electric Power Company was playing down the possibility of radiation being released from a major core meltdown. A government spokesman has since admitted to initially denying the extent of the crisis to prevent public panic — the three meltdowns were not fully acknowledged by Japanese authorities until June.

But the lack of alarm after the explosions kept Takenouchi and Joe in Tokyo half a day too long to dodge the fallout, which gradually dispersed in a cruel lottery of wind, rain and snow that contaminated homes, farms, wilderness, and eventually a schoolyard in Takenouchi's neighbourhood.

The Adachi Ward elementary school, where soil taken from a drainpipe emitted 16 times the level of radiation regarded as safe by the local government, is just one among a spate of radiation hot spots to emerge since March.

In the south of greater Tokyo, a Yokohama resident discovered sediment containing strontium-90 — which is linked to bone cancer — at nearly twice the levels of the highest traces mapped in Fukushima and more than 10 times that remaining from Cold War-era weapons testing.

But the main cause of radiation anxiety is caesium-137, which lingers in the environment for decades and can increase the risk of cancer if exposure exceeds certain levels. The total release from Fukushima of the long-lived radionuclide amounted to about 42 per cent of that emitted in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, according to a new Norwegian study.

Based on worldwide data from Nuclear Test Ban Treaty monitoring stations, the Norwegian research more than doubles the official Japanese government figure, which did not account for radiation spikes in other countries or in the ocean.

It also does not include radiation released in recent months, as workers have tried to stabilise the shattered plant and prevent nuclear fuel from melting into the ground.

An estimated 20 per cent of this initial fallout ended up on land — not just countryside but also in densely populated cities.

In the city of Kashiwa, caesium-laced late-March downpours were blamed for significant daily concentrations of ground-level radiation near a playground — levels comparable with having more than half the average person's yearly dose of natural background radiation.

While Takenouchi evacuated before the hot-spot scares, she still worries about damage to her child's health, damage she fears may be irreversible.

“No doctor in the world fully understands the effects of low-dose radiation on adults, let alone on young children. So how can the government say there is no health risk in Tokyo,” she says.

Coincidentally, on the eve of March 11, Takenouchi was putting the finishing touches to a Japanese translation of the Petkau effect — a controversial theory that claims even low levels of radiation can cause terminal diseases.

Scientists remain divided on the effects of low-dose radiation, but clusters of leukaemia, thyroid cancer, Down syndrome and birth defects in Chernobyl-exposed populations point to some of the known risks of the only other nuclear emergency rated on par with Fukushima.

“When I heard how high the radiation was that day, and I realised my baby could have breathed in those particles, exposing him to the risk of internal radiation as well as external, I was very angry that nobody warned us. That is what shocked me, not the accident itself — which had long been predicted."

Takenouchi first heard forecasts of an earthquake-triggered nuclear power blackout in Japan 10 years ago at a symposium of American nuclear safety experts. After that, she

earmarked Okinawa as a permanent getaway in the wake of a nuclear accident.

Within days of north-east Japan's natural and nuclear disasters, she traded her apartment in Tokyo for a boxy studio in

Naha, which is home to more than half of Okinawa's 1.5 million people.

A former trading empire with a distinct culture and language, the subtropical island chain is scattered between Taiwan and Kyushu in the East China Sea and is a popular holiday destination for Japanese, Taiwanese and Chinese tourists in summer.

In the main drag of her new inner-city neighbourhood of Kumoji, a backpacker and local activism hub, police calmly patrol what have become regular protests against the US military base located on Okinawa island. Now there is a new catch-cry —“no nukes”.

More than 200 people, mostly evacuees from the mainland, took part in a recent demonstration against nuclear power. The demonstrators are just some of the 17, 521 Japanese who migrated to Okinawa between March and August this year – a 12.3 per cent increase from the same period in 2010.

Okinawa prefecture is the largest region in Japan without nuclear plants.

Okinawa island, the largest in the group, has beautiful beaches, a slow-food subculture and thriving music and arts scenes. It attracts thousands of sea-changers every year, but only recently has this included

worried parents who would never have considered a move to Okinawa before the Fukushima disaster.

In a cheap-housing block in Naha, Takenouchi and 30 other refugees from around the mainland — mostly mothers with young children — share the same anxieties. They talk about bizarre rashes, high fevers, blood noses and government and industry failures “they can never forgive”.

Displaced by the March 11 tsunami, Sendai refugee Yuriko Tanaka chose to leave temporary accommodation on the north-west border of Fukushima prefecture because she did not believe her children were safe. And she was worried about a persistent rash on the body of her four-year-old son.

“It's been there since August and left scars all down his arms and hands. The doctor gave us steroid cream, which only made it worse,” she says. “My friend's child, who lives in the same area as us, got a similar rash mid-year.”

As it was difficult to prove whether something in Fukushima's fallout caused the skin reaction, Tanaka decided to take her own precautions and move to Okinawa.

Minaho Kubota is another parent who decided to seek refuge on the island. She says her life in Japan changed course the moment she heard news of the disaster .Until then, the mother of two had never even heard of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.

Her seven-year-old son, Daito, was playing outside when she turned on the the radio and heard about a series of nuclear explosions 190 kilometres north of her house in Mito City in Ibaraki Prefecture.

“I just cried,” she says. “Then Daito developed a rash on his neck.”

Four weeks later, when she was already considering leaving Japan, Kubota's baby son got his first-ever blood nose. “I decided to move as far away as possible within Japan, but it took two months to convince my husband it was a good idea.

“He thought there was no point worrying so much if there was nothing we could do about it.”

Like many of Kubota's neighbours and friends who treated Fukushima as a “taboo” subject, her husband did not like to talk about radiation.

Kubota told teachers at her son's school not to give him milk after batches with excessive amounts of caesium were recalled. The school ignored her requests.

“In the end I made up a story that he was allergic and they finally stopped giving him the milk.”

Kubota says she had “no choice” but to leave. I don't want to wait and see if my kids are part of future statistics on the consequences of Fukushima.”

Meanwhile, several NGOs have linked some people's health problems to fallout from Fukushima.

Thyroid abnormalities were found in 10 out of 130 non-evacuated Fukushima children who were exposed to excessive amounts of iodine-131 in March.

In June, door-to-door surveying in non-evacuated areas 60 kilometres from the plant revealed clusters of residents with persistent nose bleeding and diarrhoea. The same symptoms were also found among Tokyo residents.

Hiroshima survivor Dr Shuntaro Hida, who runs a non-profit hospital for Chernobyl and Hiroshima atomic bomb victims, assessed 50 patients at a one-off clinic in the middle of the year.

These symptoms appeared to varying degrees in people exposed to fallout from the Hiroshima bomb, which contained caesium and iodine but also high levels of strontium-90. Longer-term effects included malignant tumours, spinal problems, birth defects, leukaemia, breast cancer, thyroid dysfunction, radiation cataracts, and liver and heart diseases.

After seeing patients at the clinic with multiple radiation symptoms, Hida is concerned about radiation in Tokyo. While there is still no urgent public health threat in Japan, according to the World Health Organisation, he believes those people who fled to Okninawa are far from paranoid.

“It's a personal choice, as every individual has their own priorities and perceptions of the health risk. But as someone who has seen the delayed and immediate health impacts of nuclear fallout, I tend to err on the side of caution.”

Takenouchi, who helped translate one of Hida's books on Hiroshima victims, telephoned him when her son's temperature exceeded 38 degrees for the eighth time within two months of arriving in Okinawa.

“He told me that seeing I've already left the mainland, and can't take back those hours of exposure on March 15, the best thing I can do now is just keep on loving my child and try to give him a normal life here.”

Jane Barraclough is an Australian freelance journalist based in Japan.